Metaphors for Life

Since the commencement of humanity to the present time, men and women have takenpilgrimages in life to engender clarity, direction, spiritual insight, development, formation, and wisdom. Oftentimes, such journeys have been provoked by psychospiritual needs that arise as a critical part of the human condition that are couched in existential issues, many of which warrant a formation process before clarity is ascertained.

Thus, the human condition, like that of the four seasons, dynamically unfolds in its spectacular brilliance and brings with each transition a plethora and range of experiences that are imbued with mystery, meaning, and potential.

However, while the journey itself is the catalyst around which movement or a immersion into the depths is a critical and essential dimension, the driving force which provokes the journey is man/woman’s pursuit for meaning.

Consequently, the fertile ground that renders birth to the driving force "meaning," is cultivated by the fertilizers of suffering, justice, loss, death, hope, pain, presence, ambiguity, and grace.Significantly, human beings discovered many centuries ago that a medium, namely, metaphor, could be utilized in one’s attempt to articulate, to recollect, to venerate, and toascribe meaning to the journey.

Artists, Theologians, Philosophers, Prophets, Poets, and Musicians understood that the journey is fraught not so much with certainty as it is with paradox and inconsistency.
Thus, metaphor was and is used as a vehicle to render expression, integration,and spiritual wholeness to the journey and on the journey as human beings pondered and struggled with the vicissitudes of the human condition.

Moreover, three genres illustrative of the metaphor-journey are literature, music, and visual arts. The three aforementioned genres are not only critical aspects of society’s development, but our development as pastoral persons.

What metaphors do you use to define and to add meaning to your journey,life?

(c) 2001